The west coast of the US demonstrated its independence again last week, when the US 9th circuit court of appeals reaffirmed its ruling of last summer that reciting the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools (equivalent to state schools in the UK) violates the constitution.

The court made its original decision following a civil action brought by Michael Newdow, the atheist father of a Sacramento schoolgirl. Mr Newdow objected to what he saw as a breach of the constitution's separation of church and state, and the court's verdict caused apoplexy in the White House.

The president, George Bush, condemned it, saying: "America is a nation ... that values our relationship with the Almighty. We need commonsense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God."

For a while, it seemed there was a real possibility that California might be added to the axis of evil. The court later agreed to rehear the matter with a full panel.

Last Friday, they reached the same conclusion: that the phrase "under God" does, indeed, represent a violation of the founding fathers' desire to separate church and state.

The furore this time around has not been so loud, possibly because of other matters happening to the east, but attorney general John Ashcroft found time to condemn it.

Mr Ashcroft could only issue a brief criticism, because he is currently engaged in the much more vital work of organising the detention of people who sell drugs paraphernalia in "head shops".

Last week, he announced the arrest of 55 people for selling miniature scales and roach clips: presumably the reason that the national state of emergency could be downgraded from orange to yellow.

However, to get back to the pledge, one of the dissenting judges in San Francisco, Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said that the original ruling "contradicts our 200-year history and tradition of patriotic references to God".

With the greatest respect, as they say in all the best courts, this is nonsense. The original pledge was written by a Baptist socialist minister, Francis Bellamy, in 1892, and was first published in a magazine called the Youth's Companion.

It was only more than 60 years later, in 1954, that Congress, at the height of a paranoid anti-communist McCarthy period, added the words "under God". The move followed a campaign by the Knights of Columbus, a rightwing Catholic organisation which wanted to distinguish the US from the Soviet Union and its "Godless communism."

The 9th circuit court is famous for its independent judgments, but it is not composed of a stereotypical bunch of liberal Californians appointed by Democratic party presidents, something its opponents would like to suggest.

Judge Alfred Goodwin, who wrote the majority opinion, for instance, was a Nixon appointee. It was Goodwin who wrote that, in the setting of a public school, the pledge was inherently "coercive" to children, and violated the constitutional ban on government establishment of religion.

The matter will now almost certainly end up in the Supreme Court, one of whose members, Justice Anontin Scalia, last year said in a speech in Chicago: "The more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral.

"Abolition has taken its strongest hold in post-Christian Europe, and has least support in the church-going United States. I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal."

If death is no big deal to Justice Scalia, he will presumably wonder why there is such a fuss about an unnecessary late addition to a perfectly adequate pledge of allegiance. In the meantime, we should be grateful for the free-thinking air of California.